Kegan Sherman

Professor Lovitt

SED496

Feb 9th, 2021

Instructional Activity 3: Modeling a concept, activity, lab, math problem, etc

Today I had the opportunity to engage with the students via a nearpod activity that they

were doing in class. They are still covering the geologic time scale and further investigating

methods of distinguishing events and their place in time. In this lesson, the students learned

about the main methods of dating in geology. These methods are “relative dating” and “absolute

dating”. Relative dating refers to placing an estimate of time to an event or geologic feature

based on its relation to other events and geologic features interacting with it. The main idea we

taught was the law of “superposition”. This law states that sedimentary deposits are layered on

top of each other in sequence, meaning that the older layers are at the bottom and new layers are

deposited on top. We can estimate the age of a fossil, for example, by comparing it with the

relative age of the rock it was found in. The students covered this material by following along a

nearpod activity, in which were several questions they were to answer. My responsibility in this

lesson was to ask the questions, review their answers and explain the correct answer.

A skill I would relate this activity to would be formative assessment. We were teaching

the material and asking questions throughout the activity to check for understanding. The activity

was also used as an attendance check-in for the students, so that was used to ensure the students

were paying attention to be able to answer the questions as they came up on the nearpod. I think

that the activity went well for the most part and the students seemed to be grasping the concepts.
Something that I think I struggled with slightly was deciding on an appropriate amount of

elaboration for the questions. At times, I felt as if I were over-explaining the questions which

could have sounded a bit like rambling or maybe just unnecessary elaboration which cut into the

time to answer the questions. My lead teacher was happy with my involvement with the class

today and is trying to continue to adapt his lesson planning to be able to involve me more with

the class. I think that if I were to do this activity with the students again, I would just take some

notes about what key points I wanted to make when elaborating on the questions in order to

avoid rambling too much.